I analyze the basis of the market economy in classical Rome, from the perspective of personal-versus-impersonal exchange and focusing on the role of the state in providing market-enabling institutions. I start by reviewing the central conflict in all exchanges between those holding and those...

We study the effect of market incompleteness in a search model of the labor market in which the distribution of idiosyncratic uncertainty is determined endogenously. We show that costly search introduces a wealth effect at low levels of wealth such that poor agents may find optimal not to look...

We study the effect of borrowing limits on welfare in several versions of exchange and production economies. There is a "quantity" effect of a larger borrowing limit which is beneficial for liquidity constrained agents, but essentially irrelevant otherwise. There is also a "price effect" which...

We explore the accumulation of capital in the presence of limited insurance against idiosyncratic shocks, borrowing constraints and endogenous labor supply. In the exogenous labor supply case (e.g. Aiyagari 1994, Huggett 1997), the presence of limited insurance increases the demand for savings...

I provide a justification of intellectual property rights as a source of static efficiency gains in manufacturing, rather than dynamic benefits from greater innovation. I develop a property-rights model of a supply relationship with two dimensions of non-contractible investment. In equilibrium,...

We study optimal contracts in a simple model where employees are averse to inequity as modelled by Fehr and Schmidt (1999). A selfish employer can profitably exploit envy or guilt by offering contracts which create inequity off-equilibrium, i.e., when employees do not meet his demands. Such...

This chapter proposes two hypotheses on the publicity requirement and the limitations of possession to provide information for legal titling. It then tests these hypotheses by examining how legal systems deal with possession in movable and immovable property, and comparing actual and documentary...

This article develops two hypotheses about economically-relevant values of Christian believers, according to which Protestants should work more and more effectively, as in the work ethic argument of Max Weber, or display a stronger social ethic that would lead them to monitor each others...

Adopting a simplistic view of Coase (1960), most economic analyses of property rights disregard both the key advantage that legal property rights (that is, in rem rights) provide to rightholders in terms of enhanced enforcement, and the difficulties they pose to acquirers in terms of information...

Previous analysis has shown that traders may opt for specific technologies with no joint productivity advantage as a way to commit themselves to trading jointly, but only when long-term contracting is infeasible. This paper proves that specificity can also be optimal (by relaxing the...